Matters were not fully resolved, however. In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, abolishing plural marriage and disallowing Mormon church assets over $50,000. The Morrill law raised constitutional issues that Mormons fought out all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Losing in court, some Mormons (a small percentage actually) continued to practice polygamy in direct defiance of federal authority.71
Finally, the Edmunds Act of 1882 denied the vote and other constitutional rights to all polygamists. Moreover, it declared any children born into polygamous families after 1883 to be illegitimate, without the legal right of inheritance, which would have obliterated the Mormons’ coveted family structure and stripped Mormons of all their assets. They challenged the Edmunds Act in the Supreme Court case of Romney vs. United States (1889) but lost again, at which point the Mormons at last surrendered and officially renounced plural marriage. Soon thereafter, in 1896, Congress admitted Utah as the forty-sixth state. New Mexico and Arizona, whose populations had lagged far behind Utah and the other western states, followed in 1912. Thus, by the early twentieth century, all of the territories in the contiguous portions of America had achieved statehood.72
Yet westward expansion (and the territorial and statehood systems) also included Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska became a U.S. possession (though not a territory) in 1867, when William Seward, the secretary of state, negotiated to purchase all Russian claims north of 54 degrees latitude for a mere $7.2 million. This figure seems cheap today, but at that time Seward’s foes labeled the purchase of this icy acreage an act of lunacy.
Hawaii followed in 1893, when American settlers overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and established a provisional government, which the United States recognized.73 In fact, Congress had coveted the Hawaiian Islands for several years, and the islands had been populated and influenced by a large number of Americans, but business, specifically the North American sugar industry, which feared the competition, opposed annexation. However, the new president, William McKinley, supported expansion, and an annexation resolution passed Congress in 1898.74 Two years later, Congress created the Hawaii Territory, mainly with an eye for use as a coaling station for the new blue-water navy that the nation had started to construct. Although virtually no one saw the Far East as being of much importance in American security issues, the Spanish-American War had left the United States in control of Guam and the Philippines, creating a vast operating space for warships attempting to operate out of West Coast bases. In keeping with the naval doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the projection of seaborne forces at long distances was crucial, and, therefore so was their refueling and supply. Hawaii, with its wonderful natural harbor, fit the bill.
Alaska’s legal limbo from 1867 to 1912—being neither territory nor state—only exacerbated the natural animosity colonial Americans had always felt toward the federal government. Gold rushes in the Klondike and Nome from 1896 to 1900 brought more people north—twenty thousand in the new city of Nome alone by 1900—who established some fifty new mining camp/cities in a ten-year stretch. Even though the growing population led to territorial status, Alaska’s geographic isolation and low European-American population made its wait for statehood the longest of any American territory. The Alaska Railroad was built by 1923, in the process leading to the founding of Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska. Such enterprises helped, but World War II proved to be the turning point. The Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands prompted a strong U.S. military presence in Alaska, which in turn resulted in the long-awaited completion of the Alaska Highway. The Alcan, as it was called, connected the continental United States and Alaska year round via a road spanning the Canadian province of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. Meanwhile, Japan’s 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor brought a huge military force to the Hawaiian Islands, and simultaneously propelled that territory’s efforts to achieve statehood. Congress made Alaska the forty-ninth state in 1958, and Hawaii followed in 1959.
Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood temporarily ended the territorial story, but not for long. Debates over the territorial system continue today in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean and Pacific regions annexed by Americans during their nineteenth-century expansion under manifest destiny. And periodically the issue of statehood for the District of Columbia surfaces. Long before Alaska and Hawaii completed the final jigsaw that is the map of the modern United States, however, the West, as a concept, had come to an end. Barbed wire, railroads, and, eventually, the invisible strands of American civilization made the West America, and America, the West.
Prairie Populism and National Radicalism
Despite abundant opportunities on the frontier, the fact was that life in the West, especially on the Plains, was hard. For every miner who hit paydirt, ten abandoned their claims and found other work. For every farmer who managed a successful homestead, several gave up and returned east. And for every cattle rancher who nurtured his herds into large holdings, dozens sold out and gave up. There was nothing new about this, except the setting, the West. Yet for the first time, significant numbers of westerners found allies in other sections of the country—people who shared their frustrations with the same economic trends.
Miners, farmers, and laborers alike grew discontented in the late nineteenth century, often for different reasons. In mining, fishing, logging, and sawmill towns, capitalism’s creative destruction process caused tumultuous change, with economic panics causing unemployment rates to twice rise as high as 30 percent. Wage earners complained of low salaries and dangerous working conditions, which led to the formation of labor unions, not a few of which were steeped in violence and socialism. But even in the countryside, western farmers were growing angry over low crop prices, high railroad rates, and competition from agribusiness, expressing the sentiments of producers everywhere who found that they simply did not produce enough value for their fellow man. This realization, whether in the English spinning industry of the 1830s or the American auto industry of the 1980s, is difficult, especially for those falling behind. It did not, however, change the reality of the situation: with the availability of Homestead lands and the opening of the new territories, the number of farms exploded. There were simply too many farmers in America.
They too protested, but used the ballot not the bullet. A set of laws known as the Granger Laws, named for the farm network the Grangers (or the Patrons of Husbandry), began to take effect in the 1870s. Attempting to control railroad and grain elevator prices, maintain competition, and forestall consolidation, the Grangers achieved their greatest victory in 1876 with Munn v. Illinois, a case involving a grain elevator operator’s fees. The U.S. Supreme Court laid down an alarming doctrine that private property in which the public has an interest must submit to public controls.75 Under such reasoning, virtually any enterprise ever open to the public became the business of the government, a legal rendering that to a large degree stood the Constitution’s property clause on its head. Fortunately, capitalism succeeded in spite of these “reforms,” producing so much wealth that most working people prospered and industry expanded no matter what stifling regulatory barriers the growing federal and state bureaucracies threw up.
In western towns, as in the countryside, there was discontent. As in all emerging capitalist economies, the first generation of industrial laborers bore the brunt of rapid change. They worked, on average, sixty hours per week, with skilled laborers earning twenty cents an hour while unskilled earned half that, although these numbers could vary widely depending on industry and region.76 Dangerous work in industries like logging, mining, and fishing offered no job security, unemployment compensation, medical insurance, or retirement pensions, nor, frequently, did even minimal safety standards exist. Moreover, laborers were not free to bargain with business owners over wages and work conditions because government stacked the deck against them. Federal and state politicians outlawed union membership, issued court injunctions to halt strikes and cripple labor activism, and sent in federal and state government troop
s to protect the interests of powerful businessmen.
Those who tried to improve their status by forming labor unions, often in violation of local antiunion laws, found that America’s prosperity worked against them by attracting nonunion immigrants who leaped at the opportunity to receive wages considered too low by union members. An early response to the issue of low wages came from the Knights of Labor, an organization originally formed in Philadelphia in 1869, which moved west in the 1880s. The Knights sought equity in the workplace, but only for white workers; they were noted for their opposition to Chinese and African American workers. Chinese worked for wages below those Knights of Labor demanded and so the Knights, shouting, “The Chinese Must Go!” violently expelled the entire Chinese population (seven hundred) of Tacoma, Washington, in November of 1885. Later, when African American coal miners crossed the Knights’ picket lines in Roslyn, Washington, the Knights again resorted to violence. In the end, however, the black strikebreakers (and the coal company) won the day, but it was a typical union response toward minorities that held sway well into the 1960s.
More radical than the Knights of Labor were the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the “Wobblies”). These groups took labor violence to new heights, in the process severely damaging the collective bargaining cause. Under the leadership of Ed Boyce in Kellogg, Idaho, the WFM stole a train, loaded it with dynamite, and blew up a million dollars worth of the mine owners’ infrastructure. Wobblies, on the other hand, started out peacefully. Led by Big Bill Haywood, they published pamphlets, made speeches, and filled the Spokane, Washington, jail in peaceful acts of civil disobedience. Ultimately, however, the Wobblies gained fame (or infamy, depending on one’s view) in violent imbroglios known as the Everett and Centralia massacres of the World War I era.
But both those unions were exceptions that proved the rule. In the main, western laborers and their unions had legitimate grievances they tried to address through the existing political system. Although saddled with unfair governmental restraints, they worked with western governors, judges, and legislators for peaceful change. Political activism, combined with the prosperity of the capitalist system, eventually brought them the improved wealth and lifestyle they sought, in the process undercutting their very reason for existence. It presented a dilemma for leaders of the union movements, just as similar circumstances would present a difficult problem for civil-rights and union leaders in the 1980s and 1990s: what do you do when, to a large degree, you have achieved your ends? The leader must either find or create new problems that need to be resolved, or admit there is no longer a purpose for him or the organization.
Meanwhile, republican political institutions addressed the complaints of the farmers and laborers, with limited success, through Populist and Progressive political movements, both of which aimed at harnessing capitalism to protect working people from its perceived dangers. Whatever gains they achieved in the courts were illusory: there is no way to mandate higher pay or greater wealth for any group. Like the mine workers, many western farmers perceived that they were on the outside looking in at the prosperity of the Industrial Revolution. Just as the small artisans and weavers of the 1820s had been overtaken by the large spinning mills and manufacturers, farmers often could not compete without large-scale, mass-production equipment like steam tractors, mechanical reapers, spreaders, and harrowers that only well-capitalized agribusiness could afford. It was the classic tale of efficiency gains forcing out the less productive members of a profession.
Farmers, of course, perceived it differently. Small landholders blamed nearly all of their problems on federal policies favoring big business: the gold standard, the tariff, and subsidization of railroads. Like all debtors, farmers wanted inflation and pursued it through any of several measures. One strategy involved reviving the greenback, which was the Civil War currency not directly backed by gold. But this flew in the face of the system of gold-backed national bank notes established to print and circulate paper money, the network of nationally chartered banks that had operated since 1863.
Another more popular option, which appealed to miners as well as farmers, called for inflation by expanding the money supply through the augmentation of the existing gold coins with silver coins. Coinage would occur at a ratio of sixteen to one (sixteen ounces of silver for an ounce of gold, or roughly sixteen silver dollars to a gold dollar), which was problematic, since silver at the time was only worth seventeen to one (that is, it would take seventeen silver dollars to exchange for one gold dollar). The “silverites” therefore wanted to force the government to purchase silver at artificially high prices—at taxpayer expense. Silverite objectives suffered a setback when, in 1873, Congress refused to monetize silver, an action that caused the prosilver factions to explode, calling it the Crime of ’73.77
Alongside monetary policy reforms, farmers sought to create a federal regulatory agency to set railroad rates (again, more specifically, “to set them artificially low”). They rightly complained that federally subsidized railroad owners of the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific railroads gave lower rates to high-production agribusinessmen. Lost in the debate was the issue of whether those railroads should have been subsidized by the government in the first place; but once funded, the railroads, to some degree, owed their existence to Washington.78
Populism was born from this stiff opposition to gold and railroads, evolving from organizations such as the Grange (1867) and the Greenbacker Party (1876), then launched as a national political campaign in the 1890s. Both a southern and western agrarian political crusade, Populism gained special strength west of the Mississippi River. The Populist Party formed around a nucleus of southern and western farmers, but also enjoyed the support of ranchers, miners (especially silver miners), and townspeople and businessmen whose livelihoods were connected to agriculture. Although Populists courted the urban workingman voters, they never succeeded in stretching beyond their rural base. Socialists in the WFM and IWW thought Populists far too moderate (and religious) to create lasting change and, at root, hated the private enterprise system that the Populists merely sought to reform.
In the 1892 presidential election, Populist candidate James K. Weaver garnered 1 million popular votes, 22 electoral votes, and helped elect 12 Populist congressmen and three governors. On this base, Populists soon successfully infiltrated the Democrat Party.79 With “Free Silver” as their rallying cry, in 1896, Populists and Democrats united to nominate William Jennings Bryan, a fiery, thirty-six-year-old Nebraska congressman, for president. Bryan roused the Populist movement to new heights when he angrily proclaimed:
You come and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon the broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again, as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country…. Having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world…the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: “You shall not press upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!80
Yet stirring oratory never reversed a major American demographic and political shift, and the Populists simply failed to grasp the fact that in the course of the last half of the nineteenth century, political power had markedly moved from the farm to the city. This dynamic, with the farmers steadily losing clout at the polls and the marketplace, produced an angst that exaggerated the plight of the agrarians, a phenomena called psychic insecurity by historian Richard Hofstadter.81 Although Bryan carried nearly every state in the agricultural South and the West, William McKinley still defeated him handily, 271 electoral votes to 176. The frontier had, indeed, come to an end.
Despite defeat, the Populists bequeathed a disturbing legacy to American politics and economics. Their late nineteenth-century cry for government
al regulation of the economy and monetary inflation did not vanish, but translated into a more urban-based reform movement of the early twentieth century—Progressivism.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sinews of Democracy, 1876–96
Life After Reconstruction
With reconstruction essentially over, the nation shifted its attention from the plight of the freedmen toward other issues: settling the West, the rise of large-scale enterprise, political corruption, and the growth of large cities.
Chief among the new concerns was the corrupt spoils system. Newspapers loved graft and corruption because these topics are easy to write about, and they provided reporters with clear villains and strong morality plays. Patronage also dominated public discourse because of an aggressive wing of the Republican Party dedicated to overthrowing what it saw as vestiges of Jacksonianism. Moreover, the spoils issue and political corruption spilled over into almost all other aspects of American life: it affected the transcontinental railroads through the Crédit Mobilier scandal; it had reached into city administration in the reign of Boss Tweed; and it plagued the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its network of dishonest agencies. Large-scale businesses became targets of reformers because, in part, through their political influence they were seen as buying legislation. Rutherford B. Hayes inherited this continuing debate over spoils, and when he left the presidency, the issue had not been resolved.
Time Line
1877:
Munn v. Illinois case; Great Railway Strike
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 70
